37.3445, Confs: Orality and (Digital) Technologies (Greece)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3445. Wed 21 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3445, Confs: Orality and (Digital) Technologies (Greece)

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Date: 19-Oct-2026
From: Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou [pavlidou at lit.auth.gr]
Subject: Orality and (Digital) Technologies


Orality and (Digital) Technologies

Date: 27-May-2027 - 28-May-2027
Location: Thessaloniki, Greece
Contact: Secretariat of the Institute of Modern Greek Studies
Contact Email: orality_2027 at phil.auth.gr

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 30-Jan-2027

The Institute of Modern Greek Studies [Manolis Triandaphyllidis
Foundation], Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, is pleased to
announce the 5th Symposium in the framework of its activities on
spoken Greek and the research project Greek Talk-in-interaction and
Conversation Analysis. This time, the Symposium is dedicated to the
topic of Orality and (digital) technologies and will be held in
Thessaloniki (Telloglion Fine Arts Foundation of AUTh) on 27-28 May
2027. At the intersection of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and digital
linguistics, the Symposium aims to investigate the interplay between
human interaction and the various technologically enabled or
constituted forms of communication in diverse areas and platforms.
A few decades after Ong’s (1982) distinction of orality in primary and
secondary – the former associated with nonliterate/oral cultures, the
latter with literacy and analog electronic media – the digital
affordances have challenged the traditional binaries in the
conceptualization of the oral and written word. Features like
synchronous vs. asynchronous, dynamic vs. static, spontaneous vs.
elaborated, etc. (Crystal 2001) lost their descriptive primacy with
the emergence of more hybrid forms of communication. In response to
the new realities, the concept of tertiary or digital orality (Logan
2010, Soffer 2010, Heyd 2021, Cutler, Ahmar & Bahri 2022) has been put
forward.
Given the fundamentally oral nature of ordinary conversation and its
unrivaled position as “the primordial site of human sociality and
social life” (Schegloff 1987: 101), the Symposium seeks to examine
questions such as:
 - In what ways has ordinary conversation informed digital
communication?
 - And vice-versa: what influences can be observed/expected in the
opposite direction?
 - How does technologically mediated communication draw upon (and
reshape) the features,  structures, and practices of ordinary
conversation?
 - In what ways do digital forms of communication (e.g. email,
Facebook, sms) make up for inherent properties of ordinary
conversation like multimodality, prosody, quality of voice?
 - Does language use vary (and how) across different digital social
platforms?
 - Αre there differences as regards the types and implementation of
linguistic/social actions?
 - Is there dialectal, social or other variation?
 - What is the impact of language/cultures/social norms?
 - To what extent and in what way do LLMs accommodate to human
communicators and their stylistic features (e.g.
formality/informality, closeness/distance)?
 - How are issues of responsibility and accountability to be dealt
with?
The keynote speaker of the Symposium will be Prof. Susan Herring
(Indiana University, Bloomington), leading scholar in digital
linguistics and Director of the Center for Computer-mediated
Communication at the University of Indiana.
If you wish to present a paper, kindly submit two copies (Word and pdf
format) of your abstract as an e-mail attachment to
orality_2027 at phil.auth.gr by 30 January 2027. Notification of
acceptance/rejection will be communicated by the end of February 2027.
Abstracts should be be at least 300 and up to 400 words long
(excluding references). They should include the title of the paper,
author(s) name, affiliation and e-mail address.
Participation Fees:
For in-person participants: 40€, to be paid on the first day of the
Conference at the Telloglion Fine Arts Foundation.
For online participants and students: 20€.
Please note that online attendance is possible only for
non-presenters.
For further information please contact the Secretariat of the
Institute of Modern Greek Studies, Room 418, Faculty of Philosophy,
New Building, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
E-mail: orality_2027 at phil.auth.gr
Tel.: ++30 2310 997128
The Organizing Committee:
Th.-S. Pavlidou, Professor Emerita, AUTh, Member of the Institute’s
Board of Directors, Director of the research project Greek
Talk-in-interaction and Conversation Analysis
Chr. Tzitzilis, Professor Emeritus, AUTh, President of the Institute’s
Board of Directors
G. Papanastassiou, Professor of Historical Linguistics, AUTh, Director
of the Institute


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